


The Bennefits of a Mask

by Biting Words (Reyna_is_epic)



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Anxiety, Eiffel Tower, F/F, Gay, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kagami needs a hug, Kagaminette, Lesbians, Marigami, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rooftop Conversations, Stress, and adrien too, heterosexuality? What heterosexuality?, hm, idk - Freeform, jesus someone get these kids some therapy, so does Marinette, that seems to be theme for my works..., this is just for fun, tomoe tsurugi's a+ parenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24974761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reyna_is_epic/pseuds/Biting%20Words
Summary: This is becoming much too common for her taste.Much, much too common.The feeling of exhaustion that seeps through her entire body as it slowly becomes aware of its surroundings once more. The dull ache of muscles pushed to their physical limit, the throbbing that has coalesced between her eyes and beats in time with her heart, the horribly dry feeling in her mouth that makes her want to roll over and spill her guts... all of it should not be as nearly familiar as it is now.She can already hear them, their footsteps sure, their laughter and triumphant words the inevitable cheer: it's all come to take her back to the place she last was, come to take her far, far away from the wreckage of her own emotional failings."Pound it!"ORThe one in which Kagami is so very, very tired of getting akumatized and Marinette finds herself relating just a bit too much to the brash fencer. Also, something about a Ladybug and a Black Cat.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Kagami Tsurugi, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Kagami Tsurugi
Comments: 7
Kudos: 100





	The Bennefits of a Mask

Kagami was tired. 

Not in a physical sense, or at least not primarily. 

Now that she thought on it, her legs did ache quite a bit and her fingers felt like they were only going to move again after she stuck them in an ice bath for a good half-hour, but no, that was not what she meant when she said she was tired.

What she meant is that she was exhausted emotionally. It felt as if someone had reached inside of her chest cavity and scraped out all that was inside, leaving behind nothing but a hollow feeling and heaviness that would continue to drag her down for days afterward.

She’d felt this emptiness more times than she was comfortable with, and at this point, she was perfectly well versed in what it meant. 

So when the feeling of place and the sensation of the pavement beneath slowly returned to her body, nobody could blame her for simply sinking to the ground. She waits for the inevitable cheer of ‘pound it,’ that will then be followed by beeping and, if she’s lucky, arms will wrap underneath her body and carry her back to wherever it is she was before-

Oh. Wait… where  _ was  _ she before…?

_ The championship _ .

A groan escapes her lips before she can think better of it.

“Are you okay?”

Kagami almost doesn’t want to open her eyes, but she knows that not responding will only prompt more concern.

“We have got to stop meeting like this…” She groans into her hands.

“You’re… telling… me…” the breathless voice of Chat Noir finally prompts her to force her eyelids open. 

Two leotard-clad heroes stand over her, one in red, the other in black, both with matching concerned frowns and upturned brows. She wishes she could say this is the first time she’s seen the expressions, unfortunately, they’ve become something of a weekly occurrence. 

Chat’s face is red with exertion and he has his hands on his knees, keeping himself propped up against the nearest brick wall. The mysterious Ladybug stands beside him, what looks like a whisk clasped in her hand and a deep frown on her face.

“I meant are you well, you’re just kind of… lying there…” The difference between the voice she hears in recordings when forced to watch the fights back is so very different from the one she gets afterward. There’s no commanding undertone, no malice, spite, or heroic triumph hidden in her tone. Rather, there’s a softness. A gentle warmth that reminds Kagami of a mug of tea after a long day. She both relishes hearing it and wonders why it seems to be reserved for her alone.

“I will be alright,” she murmurs before rising back to her feet and ignoring the twinge that comes with standing on the stupidly twisted ankle that cost her the match that made her lose her cool in the first place. Apparently, akumatizations did not wield healing properties, pity.

Ladybug catches her shoulders before she can make some excuse to leave the immediate area and find somewhere to punch a wall for a couple of hours. The girl doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even ask a question or offer words of consolement like she has so many times before. Instead, her eyes search hers, deep pools of ocean blue that, despite the amount of pictures that Kagami has seen of them, never quite seem to be the same twice. Today they’re darker, more like a midnight sky than a sunny ocean day.

“Chat,” she says finally and her black-clad companion shoots up ramrod straight at his name, the image is almost doglike and Kagami would find it amusing if she could find the energy to care. “Can you take Kagami to our meeting spot?”

“What?” Kagami and Chat say together, a shared confusion that immediately results in them sharing a look that borders on disgust.

“I need to recharge my Kwami and fix everything,” Ladybug explains, then sets her gaze on Kagami once again. Dear God those eyes are unsettling today, devastatingly pretty despite the darkness threatening to overwhelm them-- are those freckles underneath her mask?!-- “and you and I need to have a talk.”

Kagami’s blood runs cold.

“Ladybug, I-”

“Later.” Her tone does not leave room for argument. Her expression is indecipherable.

With that her yo-yo shoots outwards from her wrist, latching onto something unseen, and away she swings, a final cry of “Miraculous Ladybug!” the only thing to follow her away.

Chat stands in the wake of the explosion of red light, a frown on his face. One of his clawed hands rests on his staff and the other at his side in a loose fist.

“Am… am I in trouble?” she can’t help but ask. This has to be at least the fifth time she’s been akumatized, she doesn’t exactly blame Ladybug for being a bit worried at that point, but as far as she knows she’s never asked to speak to a civilian directly after they were akumatized.

“I’m not sure…” is all that Chat answers before offering her a hand, “but it would be foolish to argue with her, right?”

“If you value your livelihood.” The feeling of her feet leaving the ground not by her own power should not be as familiar as it is now.

~

Chat leaves her atop the Eiffel Tower, saying something about needing to recharge his kwami and wishing her a final good-luck with his lady before disappearing into the quickly waning sunset. She knows that it’s only a matter of time before her mother realizes that she is not still at the tournament that she was supposed to be winning, but she doesn’t really want to deal with her condescending comments at the moment. Not when she’s about to get the lecture of a lifetime from Paris’s heroine herself.

Ladybug is going to lecture her about being a better person… she’s sunken to the level of Chloe.

_ Dear God. _

The sound of a yo-yo cord whizzing outwards and wind ruffling the air behind her causes her to jump and nearly fall over the railing behind her, but she manages to catch herself in time to see the pale white butterfly rising from Ladybug’s fingertips, the glowing inside of her yo-yo disappearing from sight.

“You really do attract these things, don’t you?” There’s a hint of humor in her tone, just a smidge of amusement, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes and just barely manages to grace her lips.

“Ladybug…” she finds herself whispering, awed. 

The very first time that she got akumatized Ladybug didn’t stick around long enough for her to get a good look at her. The second, she was too busy lecturing that Lila girl to pay attention. The third, however, was when they really met. That time she’d been akumatized after her mother had lectured her about her grades lacking in one of her physics class and she’d become frustrated with not being able to understand a homework problem. She’d turned into some horrid science obsessed creature that turned the laws of physics upside down in an attempt to cause mass havoc around the city, not Hawkmoth’s worst idea by far, but surely one of his less creative. 

After the battle, Kagami had found herself coming too in the middle of a public pool, wet and uncomfortable while two teenage superheroes tried to fish her out with the combined effort of the cat-boy’s staff and a life preserver hastily tied to the end of it. Needless to say, she hadn’t been very happy upon reaching solid ground. Chat had smiled sheepishly before his ring started beeping and he excused himself from the scene, leaving only the red-clad hero to take her back home. 

Ladybug had been quiet for most of the trip, only speaking to direct her to either hold tighter at particular jumps or looser when she needed to raise her arms.

However, once they’d reached her home she had set her down on her balcony and, to her surprise, didn’t immediately drop out of sight. She’d looked at her, not like she was a problem that needed to be solved, or an adversary she needed to watch out for, no. She’d looked at her with the eyes of someone who saw too much and felt it too. 

“Grades don’t define your worth.” was all she said before disappearing into the night.

From then on out that was how their interactions had played out. Sure, she’d seen the masked heroine a few times in battles with akumas that weren’t her, but for the most part those interactions were limited to her either shouting for her and the surrounding civilians to take cover or directing Chat to get her out of there as fast as possible. It was only when she got akumatized, something that happened far more often than she liked to admit, that Ladybug would visit her specifically. 

She was quiet, more than she would have expected from someone that went toe-to-toe with supervillains armed with nothing more than an indestructible yo-yo and her quick wit. Oftentimes she’d drop her off with a few parting words of wisdom, sometimes a look that teetered on sad, and, once, a hand placed on the side of her face. 

(That particular incident had been a bad one, she’d turned into some kind of demented lizard monster that sought out all that succeeded in life, gobbling them up until there was no one left. She didn’t want to think about what had set her off that time, it still made her feel ill to think about all the people that would be dead if not for Ladybug’s magic, and at her hand nonetheless.)

This is new. Never has Ladybug spared her more than a sentence, now she’s about to give her the verbal lashing of a lifetime. She can’t even blame her, she’s been akumatized far too many times to not look suspicious, even if it is an honest mistake.

“I’m so-”

“What’s going on, Kagami?”

It’s said, not as an accusation, but a tired and worried question.

“I… what?” she asks. Ladybug sighs before sinking back against the side of the tower. She’s never put much thought into it, but the suit doesn’t have pockets so her arms come up to cross over her chest, hands resting in the crook of each elbow. It’s an intimidating posture thrown off by the obvious worry in her face.

“Something is wrong,” she states it like a fact, “I don’t know you very well, but no one gets akumatized this often for no reason, and I know enough to guess you aren’t in cahoots with Hawkmoth, so what’s going on? Is something wrong at home?”

Kagami blinks once, twice, three times. It starts in her throat, a weak, almost forced thing, that quickly grows to the point where it has enveloped her entire body. Laughter, hot, bitter, hysterical laughter. She can’t breathe. 

Ladybug blinks, caught off guard by the reaction.

“Are you-”

“What isn’t wrong at home?!” The question is unprompted and it hurts physically for her to ask. She should have better control over her mouth than that, it is unbecoming of someone of her standing, but there is this bitter angry heat that has made a home in her chest and refuses to be put out.

Ladybug, the great heroine of Paris, the girl who stares down the jaws of death with a quip and a smirk, looks scared. 

“What does that mean..?” Soft and gentle, the very same way that Adrien had said it when she’d let it slip that her relationship with her mother wasn’t the greatest. Unlike with Adrien, she isn’t able to toss it aside and move on to something to do with fencing, not with the heat in her chest threatening to explode. Not with those eyes searching through the contents of her soul.

“It means that my mother can’t help but remind me at every chance she gets that I will never measure up to her standards.” With the way the heat burns at the back of her throat she half-expected the words to leave her in a scream. Instead, it is soft, cold, detached; the voice of someone reciting a book report, not a sad fact about her life that she’d come to terms with many years ago.

Not a sad fact that makes the heat at her throat turn to lead in her stomach.

Ladybug takes a step back, and for a minute Kagami fears she’s managed to scare her off, but then her step moves forwards once again. She moves one step at a time, measured and slow like she fears startling a small animal, before settling directly in front of her and resting both of her hands on her shoulders.

“Has she hurt you?” The words are heavy. Kagami can feel them striking against the lead. 

“Not physically.”

Ladybug’s eyes are still that impossible midnight blue, deep and encompassing. Suddenly all those rumors about her being something more than human seem a lot less far fetched. The hands on her shoulders tighten, not enough to hurt, but enough that she is certain she couldn’t escape if she wanted to.

“And Hawkmoth takes advantage of that…” she concludes. 

Kagami nods. Ladybug's brow clenches. She can see the righteous fury building in the depths of those impossible eyes.

For a moment she doesn’t say anything, and as emotionally drained as she is, Kagami sees no point in trying to make conversation herself. Finally, Ladybug sighs, right in Kagami’s face, and releases her.

“I would ask if you had a safe place to go, but considering why we’re having this conversation, I’m going to assume not.”

“I can handle myself,” Kagami argues. She may not have the best track record, but the heroine of Paris shouldn’t have to sacrifice her time for her even more than she already has. Ladybug scowls at her like she just suggested they jump off the tower.

“I’m sorry, Kagami, but this isn’t the kind of thing people  _ should  _ handle themselves.” One hand crosses over her torso again to rest in the crook of her other elbow, but the other remains suspended in the air, hanging close to her face as she thinks over the predicament. Her bottom lip juts out slightly.

“What else am I supposed to do?” Kagami can’t help but feel just the slightest bit insulted, “in case you hadn’t noticed, your ladyship, I’m somewhat lacking in the supportive people department.”

That infuriatingly cute pout morphs into a concerned frown.

“What about friends? Your... model boy? He’s in your fencing class, is he not?”

Kagami stifles a laugh.

“Adrien is a sweet boy, but his issues with his father are on the opposite spectrum from mine with my mother. His father is distant, my mother is overbearing. There is a difference.” Her bitter smile fades a little, “besides, he’s more preoccupied with his other friends. I may be friendly with him, but I can understand my place in his life. We share fencing and a desire to escape our lives, nothing more.”

Ladybug looks ready to throw her off the tower herself.

“You… are incredibly stubborn.”

“I get it from my mother,” Kagami says blandly. Ladybug facepalms.

“So not Adrien, family is out…” as she trails off a strange expression crosses her face. “What about that… Baker girl?”

A feeling, one that is the polar opposite of the weight that had settled in her chest, shoots up through her toes right out of the top of her head. Kagami coughs and shakes her head to try and clear it.

“Marinette is… she’s nice… but I doubt she’d understand. Besides, the poor girl is already overworked as it is. I wouldn’t want to impose more on her than I already do-”

“Not imposing just leads to more akumatizations.” Ladybug interrupts her rambles and the expression Kagami finds on her face is one of the girl who can face death on a daily basis and come out unscathed. “Needing help is not an inconvenience, Kagami.”

Kagami disagrees.

“That’s a nice sentiment, Ladybug, but needing help only makes you slow others down.”

Ladybug watches her for a moment. Then sighs.

“You do know I have a life outside of the mask, right?”

Kagami’s world drops out from beneath her.

“I…”

Ladybug smiles. It’s weak.

“I may not have the same issues with my parents as you,” Kagami is reeling at the fact that  _ Ladybug  _ has  _ parents _ . That  _ Ladybug  _ is talking about a life that she’s certain that only Chat Noir knows exists. “But, I have my fair share of responsibilities, not to mention the fact that I’m one of only two people standing between this city and destruction. If anyone can understand being unable to meet expectations and the backlash that comes with it, it would be me.”

“But…” Kagami feels like she’s been stuck in a jar and shaken around for a bit. “But the people love you..?”

“Some do,” Ladybug agrees “Others? Not so much. Hawkmoth showed up at the same time Chat and I did, some people take that to mean that we’re connected or, worse, we’re part of the same ruse to terrorize the city of Paris. The only reason Chat and I aren’t fugitives is because there isn’t another way to get rid of an Akuma other than my yo-yo. I hear and see everything, Kagami, I know that some people love me.” Her smile turns bitter, “and I know that some would rather see me dead.”

“I… you…” she sinks to her knees.

Ladybug sits down across from her, cross-legged and calm.

“I’ve seen and suffered a lot of verbal abuse. I’m not fast enough, I’m not strong enough, I cause more problems than I solve, the list goes on…” Ladybug’s gaze is distant, even if it’s settled on Kagami’s face. “That’s not even diving into what goes on when I’m not in costume. I’ve earned a bit of a reputation as a slacker. It’s hard to be on time for appointments and class when I’m constantly getting called out to go fight Hawkmoth’s villain of the day…” Then, in a movement almost dog-like, she cocks her head to the side as if someone is whispering in her ear. Her eyes snap back into focus and settle on Kagami once again. “I guess what I’m getting at is…”

Her brows do a strange dance. Her eyes look her over, searching for something, then, seemingly finding it.

“Without help, I’d be useless.”

Kagami can feel the foundations of the tower beneath her giving way.

“But… you’re  _ Ladybug… _ ” she says as if that is all she has to. As if being Ladybug makes her untouchable, makes her invincible. As if Kagami is nothing more than a small child finding out that Santa Claus does not exist.

“True,” the teenager across from her agrees, “but I’m only human. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m not perfect. If Chat didn’t have my back in fights I wouldn’t be able to defeat Akumas. If I didn’t have my parents' support in my day to day I wouldn’t be able to face the trials of school. If I didn’t have my kwami I wouldn’t have the courage to get out of bed in the mornings…” she trails off, that distant expression crossing her gaze once more before she shakes it away. “I need their help. Otherwise, I can’t complete my responsibilities, and the entire city falls.”

Kagami can’t help but feel that this is the first time that Ladybug has admitted this to anyone, Chat Noir included.

“Asking for help doesn’t make you weak. Help is like… a tree…”

Kagami must make a strange face because Ladybug flushes slightly before struggling to finish her thought.

“You start at the seed, in this case a person, and that person helps someone else with something else. Sometimes the help is small, opening a door for someone, walking your neighbor’s dog, etc. Sometimes the help is big, calling an ambulance or paying someone’s medical bills--”

“Or saving the city?” she volunteers, soft. Ladybug smiles encouragingly.

“Right. And that help spreads outwards, like branches on a tree, shooting upwards and outwards, reaching towards the sun until you’re left with a large, healthy tree that can bear fruit or leaves or flowers or whatever. We all benefit from it in the end, but in order for the tree to grow, someone has to plant the seed.”

Ladybug settles her with a serious look once more, “Let me plant this one. Let me help you.”

Kagami stares. She stares, she thinks, she breathes.

She sighs.

“Okay.”


End file.
